America is too big for planes, too. If your transportation solution is flying, now everyone has to get around via endless highways or big, complicated regional airports, and you can only have so many of those. There's a reason why rural areas in North America have completely different politics from urban areas, and why so much of it is driven by a sense of isolation and abandonment. Trains promise to help here because they are able to stop in small places that will never, ever have practical airports.
A good rail network provides a reliable, consistent, repeatable, and straightforward three hour connection from Nowheresberg to the nearest city. Slow, but good enough to feel like they exist in the same planet. Unfortunately, that promise is subtle, and it plays out over decades, so the reward system we've created for ourselves is incapable of supporting it. And thus, we have Amtrak and confederate flags
Coming from a more rural region, even if trains were available, when people go to the city they come back with their car filled up with stuff because it's easier to find/cheaper in the city, most won't take the train even if it's available if they have their car they can rely on.
But cars are still more efficient (L/km/passenger) than planes so we don't need more planes for rural regions either.
Yeah going to the grocery store was a 40 minute round trip growing up. You go there and buy as much as you can so you don't have to go again for two more weeks. Having a train will not be suitable for this type of trip.
A 40 minute round trip would be average in most US cities, eg Dallas, Denver, Atlanta, suburban Chicago, etc
Those cities have grocery stores every exit off the highway. I'm in NW Ohio and while every town over 15,000 people has at least onc grocery store, lota of the surrounding villages do not. 30 miles each direction to a grocery store is rough. Growing up in suburbs of major cities, i cant remember a grocery store being further than 5 miles away. It's a vastly different experience.
So wouldn't that be ~1.5 hours round trip? 40min one way
No, but a walkable city is. Even in a small town, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to park once then walk to the grocery, the movie theater, the home center, etc
May I point out that this effect is killing small towns and living-wage jobs? Before the car, there had to be stores and groceries and doctors' practices, et cetera, in small towns. Those provided local jobs for people, and community. Now, people drive into the city, or to the regional Walmart, and the small towns are decaying, mired in crippling poverty, isolation, and the diseases of despair that we see today. So the car might offer "freedom" to load up on a large selection of cheap consumer goods, but at the cost of dignity, connection, and meaning.
(Walmart, by the way, can be seen as predatory, killing small business with prices they can't match, but also, it is successful largely because it is so well-adapted to a car-based lifestyle. It's not the cause, it's an effect.)